Beautiful touches but a bit too controlled
Fantastique, New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Holly Mathieson. Music by Takemitsu, Ker and Berlioz. Michael Fowler Centre, May 14. Reviewed by Max Rashbrooke
The more I attend concerts, the more it strikes me that the modern system of classical music training turns out performers who are disciplined, professional, informed about centuries of performance practice – and a touch too cautious. Gone are the days when a pianist such as Alfred Cortot could overwhelm with the sheer beauty of his tone an audience that overlooked the frequent slews of wrong notes.
These thoughts were uppermost at Friday night’s New Zealand Symphony Orchestra concert helmed by Holly Mathieson, a Dunedinite making her mark on the international conducting stage.
Bringing these talents to bear on a dream-themed programme, she kicked things off with the Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu’s Dreamtime (Yume no Toki), a rich, magical procession of reveries. The tempo was perfect, loose enough to allow for the elasticity of dreams but tight enough to suggest their basic tension and unpredictability.
Less successful was The Third Dream by New Zealand composer Dorothy Ker – not because it was badly played (it wasn’t) but because it wasn’t an especially effective piece of writing. Lacking coherence, it featured haunted-house effects that – perhaps because we are now too familiar with them from films – felt stagey, borderline risible even, and it struggled to match the emotional intensity of the Greek tragedy on which it was ostensibly based.
Towering over both pieces, of course, was Hector Berlioz’s famous and fabulous Symphonie Fantastique. From the outset, Mathieson conducted with total, crystalline clarity and control. The first movement’s great harmonic arc was beautifully sketched: ‘‘You can hear him playing the structure,’’ as my piano teacher, the late Elaine Sharman, used to say about Michael Houston. The tone and feel of the symphony’s first notes could still be heard in the last ones, a rare achievement even among the best conductors. And along the way there were beautiful touches: a sharp, intense finale in the second movement’s ball scene, for instance, or the sad stillness of the third movement’s slow passages.
What was lacking, though, was any real sense of the bizarre, disordered passion of the work, the feeling of unrestrained desire and fury, the intimation that something is always on the verge of breaking down or losing its borders.
It is a dilemma that classical music – with its discipline and formality – always confronts when it tries to play something animalistic but a dilemma that must be overcome nonetheless.
And here everything felt a touch too safe, too controlled. The programme notes rightly described the symphony as a primal scream but was there anything primal in this performance? Not really.